That third point is the sticking point for most brands, and that is what this article aims to help you out.

Note that for step 3, personally, I prefer this way of phrasing it: corroboration on multiple trusted, authoritative, independent third-party sites.

You’ll see why I chose to say “significant coverage in multiple independent, reliable, secondary sources” when you get to the end of the article.

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It Isn’t Just Wikipedia

The knee-jerk for confirmation is “create a Wikipedia article”, which is understandable since Wikipedia has traditionally given a quick, easy route into the Knowledge Graph.

A brand with a Wikipedia article has a great chance of being included in the Knowledge Graph.

Corroboration for the Knowledge Graph Has Always Required More Than Just Wikipedia

Quick aside: Over the years I have been tracking knowledge panels and the Knowledge Graph API, there has never been a direct correlation between Wikipedia articles and Knowledge Graph presence,

The Knowledge Graph has always contained some brands that have no Wikipedia pages, and some brands that have Wikipedia pages are not in the Knowledge Graph.

Andrea Volpini, the brains behind WordLift (a SaaS that builds internal knowledge graphs), has mentioned to me conversations he has had with people at Google and Bing.

The key for them in determining “knowledge” is multiple confirmations (a.k.a., solid corroboration).

A number that has been mentioned is 30 confirmations/corroborations.

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Obviously, it is not a hard and fast rule, a brand can get in with less, or it may take more, all depending on the consistency of the information and the trustworthiness/authoritativeness of the sources.

That said, 30 is useful since it gives us a target to aim for and prevents us from stopping after adding the brand to just a couple of sources that we think are authoritative and trustworthy.

This leads us neatly onto the question…

What Are the Sources Google Considers ‘Trusted & Authoritative’?

Beyond Wikipedia, if you heard the noise around this (partial) quote from Amit Singhal at Google, you might immediately think: the CIA World Factbook, Freebase, and Wikidata.

The full quote from Amit Singhal paints a different picture… here it is in full in this article (importantly, written back in 2012):

“Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.” – Amit Singhal

So, the list of trusted sources has always been long, we simply didn’t have a window to see what they might be.

Geo-specific sites such as irishtimes.com, oecm.ca, ft.com, marketindex.com.au… (see below for the international analysis).

International: Beyond the USA

As a rule, brand SERPs are one of the most (perhaps the most) volatile across countries.

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Nathan Chalmers, Whole Page Product Manager, Bing, confirmed this observation to be true during his interview for my podcast (a series of five exclusive interviews to be released April 2020).

But for knowledge panels, things are different and there is little variation.

The number of knowledge panels doesn’t vary a great deal across the English-speaking countries I track on Kalicube.pro. Knowledge is universal, it seems.

But then the use of Wikipedia as the cited source varies quite a lot.

Intriguingly, New Zealand is the country that relies least on Wikipedia, and the U.S. the most (table is ordered from least to most reliance on Wikipedia).

Which Are the Most Influential Sources Worldwide Outside Wikipedia?

One last intriguing figure: the reliance on the new favorites, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and Bloomberg is around 75% globally.

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So Google still has a strong reliance on training wheels. It is just getting more adventurous with them.

Intriguingly, New Zealand is most reliant on these three and the USA least.

I purposefully left the countries in the same order as the first table (i.e., from least to most reliance on Wikipedia) and it is striking that the reliance on these other three is almost the exact opposite to Wikipedia.

Conclusion: 3 Steps to Get in the Knowledge Graph Without a Wikipedia Article

Step 1: Make sure information on your site sets out clearly who you are and what you do.

So (ironically), to get a place in the Knowledge Graph without a Wikipedia page, you need to build a case for notability – exactly what Wikipedia is asking for:

“…[S]ignificant coverage in multiple reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject.”

Now, that may sound and feel frustrating. But I don’t think it is.

Your aim is to prove to Google that your brand is notable… but the barrier is lower than it is for Wikipedia.

You are building a case and presenting it to an unbiased machine rather than to human editors at Wikipedia.

You now have a great kick start. A list of sources you can use as inspiration to find the places Google trusts. All you need to do is place those 30 trusted corroborations to trigger your place in the Knowledge Graph.

There are a vast number of sources that are not used as citations but are trusted nonetheless (the citations are merely those that best represent the brand). A source can be:

Trusted by Google without being cited and a source.

Used as a citation for one brand without being sufficiently relevant to be a trusted source for another.

Used as a citation without being most trusted (the fact that Google often cites brands’ own websites points clearly to the idea that it is citing the most representative text rather than the most trusted source).

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Use your imagination and good sense to find those that have not yet surfaced in knowledge panels, but are likely to be trusted given your brand, industry, and geo-location.

The list of trusted sources displayed in knowledge panels on Kalicube.pro is publicly available here (updated daily).

An Overview of Wikipedia’s Concept of Notability for Brands

You can use this approach to build a convincing case for notability for Google’s Knowledge Graph/knowledge panel.

The primary criteria have five components that must be evaluated separately and independently to determine if it is met: